THE FOUNDER IN AUTUMN
When Josh Luber, co-founder of StockX, was in the sixth grade, he started his first business: selling Bubblicious to his classmates. Covertly, because they weren’t allowed to chew gum in school.
“It was a great business,” he says. “Good margins. I used to hop the fence behind my house, go to the Acme grocery store, and buy four packs of gum for $1. Each pack had five pieces, and I could sell them for a quarter apiece.”
Like a lot of ’80s and ’90s kids, Luber also idolized Michael Jordan. He was 6 years old when Nike released the first Air Jordans, and begging his mom for a pair became a constant refrain. (Her answer: a constant no.) Post-college, after cashing a few paychecks from his furniture-store job, he went to Foot Locker and dropped $125 on a pair of Air Jordan 11 Concords: white fabric tops, shiny black middles, undulating taupe soles.
The sneakers were more than a fashion statement. For Luber, that purchase commenced a quest to understand and capitalize on the economics of the $130 billion universe of sneakers, particularly those that are released in limited quantity, usually ones designed in collaboration with zeitgeisty athletes or musicians.
Almost two decades later, Luber sits in a corner office at the downtown Detroit headquarters of StockX, the resale marketplace he co-founded in 2015, which has grown from a fantastical idea about building a “stock market of things” to a company of nearly 1,000 employees, valued at more than $1 billion. Thanks to the internet, sneakerhead culture has grown from local networks of hobbyists into a booming global business. Driven by collectors who see rare sneakers as investment assets or a way to make a quick buck—by, say, flipping a pair of soldout $125 sneakers for three times that much—the
